[License-discuss] How can we as a community help empower authors outside license agreements?

[Russell Nelson]

On 3/20/20 10:11 AM, John Cowan wrote:
> For OSI the effect is even stronger than for UL.  Every time OSI 
> denies certification on grounds other than non-conformance to the OSD 
> (such as redundancy, lack of templatification, etc.), it implicitly 
> concedes that OSI Certified (tm) and open source are not the same thing.
Open Source is what we say it is. The OSD and what happens on this list 
is the same relationship between legislation and case law. Debian does 
the same thing. You can read the DFSG all you want, but there's more to 
the decision of whether they'll include software than what's in those 
guidelines. The important part isn't the license, but the community that 
the license creates. As such, we need to worry more about community than 
legality.